National Canadian Film Day: Grade-Eh Cinema from Sun-Up to Sundown on Wednesday
By Jim Slotek
Sometimes, you can support Canadian film without even knowing it. When I was in high school in Thunder Bay, a horror film called Shivers was opening locally. My friends and I saw the trailer, and we knew we had to go.
The film was even more bonkers and bloody than we expected, being about a sexually-transmitted disease that resembled a piece of liver, that turned people into sex-crazed zombies.
Daniel Radcliffe and Megan Park in Michael Dowse’s The F Word.
We spent the next week tossing lines of dialogue from the movie at each other (including the favourite: “I’m hungry! Hungry for love!”).
We weren’t aware that the movie was Canadian, nor that it was the debut feature by a young guy named David Cronenberg.
The blinders are off this Wednesday on National Canadian Film Day. The runaway successful day of celebration of Canadian film, started nine years ago by the charitable organization REEL CANADA, now reaches virtually every part of the country and is even celebrated internationally.
The events – screenings, panel-discussions, Q&As - are live, in-person, virtual and programmed on national TV.
Marc-André Grondin in C.R.A.Z.Y.
To the latter, Super Channel has a sun-up to sundown lineup of Canadian films on its three channels (my top picks from Super Channel Vault: The F Word from Canada’s best comedy filmmaker Michael Dowse (Goon, FUBAR), Dead Ringers from that Cronenberg guy and Kari Skogland’s adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel.)
Hollywood Suite is going all-Indigenous on its 2000s movie channel, with films like 2018’s Indian Horse (based on Richard Wagamese’s novel about a survivor of the residential school system who finds his way out via his hockey skills, and Darlene Naponse’s Falls Around Her (2019), starring Tantoo Cardinal in her first leading role as a touring musician who returns to her community.
A Canadian film that rocked my world as an adult – C.R.A.Z.Y. by the late Jean-Marc Vallée - is screening at sponsored venues across the country.
C.R.A.Z.Y., along with the Toronto Film Critics Award-winning Beans and the dystopian sci-fi Indigenous film Night Raiders, will also be part of a NCFD screening program with Telefilm partnering with the Network of Independent Canadian Exhibitors in independent cinemas in 30-plus communities across Canada, with virtual Q&As with cast and crew.
And the filmmakers themselves are also getting into the act. Beans’ Tracey Deer and Night Raiders’ Danis Goulet will take part in an in-person discussion in Toronto, that will be streamed online courtesy of APTN and CBC.
We’re just scratching the surface here, considering there’s events in 300 high schools across the country, and screenings of scores more movies (the Indigenous zombie film Blood Quantum by Jeff Barnaby is one of my genre favourites of the past decade)
You can find all National Canadian Film Day events scheduled HERE.